No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
The so called white races are really pinko-grey.
I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror – on thethings that I might have avoided.
One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.
A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel’s success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.
We may divide characters into flat and round.
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature – for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong .
Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.
Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.
There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding.
The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me – a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn’t dignified doesn’t worry me.
English literature is a flying fish.
Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.